An anonymous tipster sent in a note about a PowerPoint v.X limitation:

PowerPoint v.X cannot read PowerPoint 4 files! Simply by upgrading to the most recent version of PowerPoint you may lose access to your old (or in my case, not so old) files. There is no mention of the inability to open PowerPoint 4 files anywhere in the help documents or in the knowledge base articles available from MS Mactopia.

I did some experimenting with the two versions of PowerPoint which I own (from Office98 and Office v.X) and a couple of version 4 presentations. As the hint suggested, PowerPoint v.X refused to open them, although they were handled easily by PowerPoint 98.

After some experimentation and help from the hint submitter (as I lack a version 4.0 of my own), we came up with a workaround that will allow you to convert these older files to the new version, assuming you own (or have access to) Office98. Use PowerPoint98 to open the version 4 presentations and select File -> Save As. When the save dialog opens, select "Presentation Template" as the file format. Launch PowerPoint v.X and open the template you just saved and then save it again as a normal PowerPoint presentation with a new name.

Although this works, you may lose some formatting (I lost some font information from one presentation, but not from another), but at least you'll be able to migrate your older files to the newest version of PowerPoint.

While Microsoft can certainly make whatever decisions they wish regarding support for past versions, and PowerPoint 4 is quite old (last sold in 1997), it would have been nice if they had at least documented this limitation!

What's worse is that when you hit command-s with a new presentation in Office 98, the little helpful Mac SE guy comes up with a message similar to this:

"Not all users will have the latest version of Office like you, maybe you might want to save this document in an older format like Powerpoint 4.0"

So it suggested users to save in 4.0 and then 2 versions of the software later, its not supported, rediculous. And yes, the only work around i know of is to open each presentation and go to save as for each one.

1) Continued support for v4 reduces the incentive to upgrade.
2) Telling you about dropped support reduces the incentive to upgrade.
3) Reduced incentives to upgrade reduce the money that flows to MS.
4) Reduced money flow to MS is not what MS wants.

5) Most important: This is what it means to get into bed with the Beast. After the last decade I'm surprised that anyone's surprised by this.